Deployable high-fidelity metagenome binning at scale with QuickBin

1.Reconstructing genomes from metagenomic assemblies is foundational to microbiome research, yet metagenome binning remains constrained by a persistent trade-off between genome fidelity and deployable throughput. Many high-accuracy approaches rely on GPU-intensive workflows, marker-gene-informed postprocessing, or resource demands that limit reproducible use at catalog scale. Here we present QuickBin, a CPU-native, marker-free binning algorithm designed to recover near-complete, ultra-low-contamination metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) under practical compute constraints. QuickBin couples a GC-coverage spatial index (BinMap) with a hierarchical, early-exit Oracle cascade of similarity tests (scalar composition/coverage filters followed by SIMD-accelerated k-mer comparisons), invoking a compact neural network only for the small fraction of ambiguous candidate merges. Across synthetic communities evaluated by both marker-based estimates and contig-origin ground truth, QuickBin yields high recovery while maximizing the fraction of sequence assigned to uncontaminated bins. In a benchmark of 297 diverse real metagenomes, QuickBin completed all runs and recovered more MAGs meeting [≥]95% completeness and [≤]1% contamination than widely used CPU binners and compute-intensive alternatives that frequently failed to finish under standardized limits. QuickBin provides a practical path to reproducible, high-fidelity genome-resolved metagenomics at scale for downstream comparative analyses and data products that depend on low-artifact genome reconstructions. The full software package is open-source and available for download at https://bbmap.org, GitHub repo (https://github.com/bbushnell/BBTools), or Docker container (https://hub.docker.com/r/bryce911/bbtools).